ES&S_

Secretary of State Mary Herrera assured lawmakers Thursday that her office was prepared for the June primary election, but county clerks worry about the possible failure of memory cards in voting machines used across New Mexico.

Representatives of the state's 33 county clerks said they need extra memory cards to protect against failures during the election. The cards hold ballot information and are necessary for vote tabulators to operate.

Ballots must be hand counted — a potential source of delays in reporting the outcome of races — if tabulators aren't working.

Voter System Firm Seeks New Contract: Secretary of state says there's no one else to provide maintenance

(Albuquerque Journal (NM) (KRT)

Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)

Feb. 27--SANTA FE -- The Nebraska firm that built New Mexico's voter registration system is seeking a no-bid contract to provide maintenance.

Nebraska-based ES&S is seeking a renewal after its original maintenance contract expired Jan. 6, a state General Services Department spokesman said this week.

"The secretary of state is trying to sole source this and they have to justify it -- that there's no one else who can operate it," said Alex Cuellar of GSD.

James Flores, spokesman for Secretary of State Mary Herrera, said his agency has "no choice" but to go with a no-bid contract. "It's their system," Flores said of ES&S. "If you buy a Volvo and something breaks down, you have to go to Volvo."

ES&S' attempt to renew the voter registration contract comes amid complaints that the state provided outdated or incomplete voter registration lists to the state Democratic Party and that they might have contributed to the party's problem-riddled presidential caucus on Feb. 5.

However, the Secretary of State's Office and ES&S say the firm played no role in the caucus problems because it does not remove or add voters' names from the lists. Responsibility for updating the lists falls to county clerks around the state.

"ES&S' role related to the New Mexico voter registration database is limited to providing centralized voter registration software, working with the state to implement the centralized system, and providing technical support in using the system," ES&S spokeswoman Jill Friedman-Wilson said Tuesday.

While some party officials have speculated the problems started with the state, other reports have suggested the problems began when the party -- which ran the caucus -- consolidated voting precincts across New Mexico.

JoshGeise, the state Democratic Party's interim executive director, declined to say where he thought the blame might lie.

Former Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron hired ES&S in 2000 to construct and maintain the state's centralized voter registration system. The recently expired agreement ran through Jan. 6, 2004, with the state able to grant four oneyear extensions, which it did.

Friedman-Wilson acknowledged that ES&S was seeking a renewal of the contract but would not discuss the terms Tuesday.

The state paid $195,000 for the software under the agreement. ES&S also charged counties varying fees for technical and software support.

The same firm outfitted New Mexico with its paper ballot voting machines and tabulators in 2006 and one of its subsidiaries maintains the secretary of state's campaign finance reporting Web site.

Contracts with Unaccountable Private Vendors Like ES&S in NM and Elsewhere, Continue Taking Costly Toll on American Democracy...
On Wednesday, we covered some of the massive problems emerging from New Mexico's Democratic Party Caucus on Super Tuesday. The razor-thin margin between Obama and Clinton remains in question at this hour after ballot boxes were discovered to have been kept overnight, uncounted, at the home of a party official; voters faced long lines at the polls; and some 17,000 voters (11% versus 4% in the last caucus) were forced to vote on provisional ballots.

NPR had reported on Thursday that the state's Democratic party, which ran the election, as opposed to the state itself, had decided to do a full recount of all ballots. Tonight, though, John Gideon informs us the report was incorrect, and only "all qualified provisional ballots" are set to be counted by officials.

Democratic party officials in New Mexico may have used an incomplete list of registered voters on Super Tuesday -- prepared for the secretary of state by a private vendor -- causing nearly 13 percent of Democrats to find they were not on precinct voter rolls when they showed up to choose a presidential nominee.

As a result, the New Mexico Democratic Party is now in the process of validating and counting more than 17,000 provisional ballots. That count will likely determine who won the nation's closest Democratic nominating contest so far in 2008. It is unclear whether the voter list that resulted in so many provisional ballots -- or an updated list -- will be used to verify, validate and count the 17,000 votes.

With 183 out of 184 precincts reporting, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., held a lead of 1,092 votes -- 67,921 votes compared to 66,829 for Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., according to the Associated Press. That tally does not include the provisional ballot count.

Following an internal assessment of voting machines used in 2004 and 2006, Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman fired off letters to major voting machine vendors informing them that their products had been decertified for use do the detection of serious flaws in their programming that could jeopardize the integrity of the 2008 vote count.

Listed below are the machines decertified and the primary reasons for their disqualification. Note that Precinct Optical Scanner, M100, decertified due to an "inability to complete testing threshold of 10,000 ballots due to vendor programmer errors," is the same model used in every precinct in the state of New Mexico.

Note that the ES&S iVotronic systems were decertified due to"vulnerability to security attack" and "failure to provide audit-able data to detect security violations."The iVotronic was used exclusively on election day2004in San Juan County, NM… no other NM County used this equipment. The election day undervote rate in precincts with >50% Native American populations was 5.8%. The election day undervote rate in precincts with >50% Anglo populations was 2.3%.

In addition, Colorado decertifiedSequoia Voting Systems (CO Sequoia Decertification.pdf ) for"failure to operate in a secured state requiring passwords" and "failure to provide auditable data to detect security violations." Sequoia Voting systems were used throughout New Mexico during the 2004 election. To see exactly where, check out this link.

To learn more about irregularities in the 2004 election due to e-voting, check out this study of the 2006 elections results, published onBrad Blog.

BREAKING FL-13: NEW UNDISCLOSED LETTER OF AGREEMENT FROM ES&S TO STATE UNEARTHED!
Terms of 'Independent' State Run Audit, Source Code Review Dictated by Voting Machine Company to Florida State Election Director Prior to Tests of Failed Touch-Screen Voting Systems from Contested Jennings/Buchanan Election!

The private voting machine company which manufactured the touch-screen hardware and software used during Sarasota, Florida's contested District 13 Congressional election between Christine Jennings (D) and Vern Buchanan (R) sent a letter in December of 2006 to David Drury, the chief of the state's Bureau of Voting Systems Certification, dictating the terms of the state-run audit convened to investigate the causes for massive undervote rate which seems to have tipped the election.

The extraordinary 3-page letter (posted in full at the end of this article) from Electronic Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S) Vice President, Steven Pearson, is described as an "agreement" and instructs Drury on what may and may not be disclosed in the state's final audit report regarding the investigation.